The Virtual Life Of Film

The Virtual Life Of Film David Norman Rodowick Additional Author mixed material bibliography Harvard University Press 2007 193 As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of 'watching a film' is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema?and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century. Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists?at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called 'new media' are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century?and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish. The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick review by Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin is an independent writer and teacher who writes for The List in Edinburgh and various film and literary journal Digital cinematography; Photography - Digital tech 9780674026681 C2O library Online catalog (BETA) 778.53 ROD Vir 3988 C2O library & collabtive (Literature & Literary Theory) 4000 virtual-life-of-film.jpg 3877 2015-01-02 09:50:52 2015-01-02 09:50:52 machine generated